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Barcelona Terror attack: Aussies injured

Barcelona Terror attack: Aussies injured

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has confirmed three Australians have been hurt when a van mowed people down in a popular tourist spot, killing more than a dozen people and injuring around one hundred more.

Back in the day: Mark 'Chopper' Read is escorted to a police divvy van.

"It is as a husband, father and friend that Mark will be missed most deeply."

The family requested privacy in their time of grief.

Beneath his incredible machismo was a very gentle, straight-shooting giant of an Australian man.

Read spent much of his adult life in prison for committing multiple violent crimes, and gained infamy in his younger days for sometimes using a blowtorch or bolt cutters to remove the toes of his targets.

He also had a fellow Pentridge Prison inmate slice off both of his ears while in jail.

Read later used his career in crime as the basis for a series of best-selling true crime books, although exactly how ''true'' many of the stories are has been questioned.

"Look, honestly, I haven't killed that many people," Read said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, "probably about four or seven, depending on how you look at it.''

Read was diagnosed with liver cancer in April last year and he also had cirrhosis. He said his illness started after contracting hepatitis C while in prison.

Wilhelmina McGee won't quickly forget the first bloke to walk into the Leinster Arms Hotel when she and her husband bought it in 2001. "Chopper" would become a good mate and regular source of entertainment. "He lived his life pretty hard," she said.

Even in the past four years, when his drink of choice was a "raspberry lemonade", Chopper could hold the room with his humour.

"The 12 years I've known Mark I've never seen a bad side, an angry side, I don't know what he did in his previous life, but he was just a normal family man," she said.

"He told so many stories over the years I don't even know where to start.''

To his former publicist and friend Di Rolle, Read was simply "a unique Australian character".

"Beneath his incredible machismo was a very gentle, straight-shooting giant of an Australian man,'' she said.